Earlier this month, Sony has released a new firmware updatehas, among other things, added a customizable welcome hub to the PlayStation 5 home screen. It’s an inconspicuous one of them the best new features The console is showing its age, but it’s been overshadowed by an equally frustrating change that has resulted in a lot of random garbage, including advertising, being spread across players’ screens whether they want it or not.
The Welcome Hub is the new home tile in the PS5’s main menu and allows players to choose what is displayed, from controller battery life to discounted games on their PlayStation Store wishlist. Additionally, players can disable an optional news feed widget that pulls random announcements for all games they follow. Unfortunately, this newsfeed now infects the rest of the console’s home screen.
Tiles for installed games used to display background graphics or activity cards when you scrolled over them. However, after a recent change, they now refer to the most recent entry in the game’s news feed. Sometimes the results are harmless, but other times it means everything from YouTube thumbnails to marketing for other games dominates the screen when certain games are selected to play.
“So it turns out that the recent PS5 UI update that allowed you to disable all ads on the dashboard was too good to be true.” tweeted User Earl Turlet on the weekend. “Now EVERY SINGLE GAME on your homescreen shows you an ad in the background that you can’t remove lol.” YouTuber Mystic I also put together a detailed video Guide players through the changes.
One of the most egregious examples is a “What is Warhammer?” video Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2The Spider-Man: Miles Morales Page with an advertising image from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse which came out over a year ago, and award entries that embellish the art of a game with review scores and testimonials. Sometimes the newsfeed shows a completely different game, e.g Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition on PS4, whose background art is now displayed Lego Horizon Adventures instead. “It’s a huge downgrade in the user interface” wrote one player on Reddit Calling on others to protest the changes. “Ring of fire promotes a mousepad FFS.”
Hopefully Sony will revert the change. Ideally, players would be able to customize backgrounds for games in the same way they can in the Welcome Hub, choosing between official artwork or even their own screenshots. And if some players do want quick access to the news feeds of the corresponding games, Sony may be able to better represent what they’re curating. In many cases, a simple list of the latest official headlines from the PlayStation Blog or social media accounts for these games would be much more useful than the way the feeds are currently structured.
Update 09/30/2024 4:41 p.m. ET: There are problems with the news feed are a bug According to Daniel Hiatt, Senior Product Manager at PlayStation. It sounds like it will be fixed soon.
